


Happiness like never before

by samariumwriting



Category: The Legend of Zelda & Related Fandoms
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Developing Relationship, Fluff, Friendship, Gay Male Character, Nonbinary Character, Other
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-08-03
Updated: 2019-12-01
Packaged: 2020-07-30 09:07:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 3,704
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20094772
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/samariumwriting/pseuds/samariumwriting
Summary: Link has experienced his fair share of hardship, his childhood cut short years ago for the sake of a war he didn't even want to fight. He just wants the chance to live again, and the chance comes in a way he really wasn't expecting.





	1. Scandal

**Author's Note:**

> So back in November I dumped out a bunch of stuff on Link/Sheik soulmate AUs and then never posted any of it and my unposted/wip fanfic document hit 80 pages the other day so I'm sorting it out  
To start off, I've posted three chapters here because they work better as a complete unit

Not Your Hero: The Paradox of Link Urealia

The so-called legendary Hero of Hyrule stunned the nation last night in his refusal to stand for the Hyrulian anthem during the service remembering the dead in the war.

The service took place yesterday evening in the Church of Hylia, known previously as the site of the historic Temple of Time. It sought to remember the currently known 47,426 soldiers who lost their lives alongside the 56,982 missing and countless civilians who are dead or missing.

The service progressed as expected for most of the events, including a speech given by Sir Urealia himself, as well as the King of Hyrule. It was an emotional service, broadcast live on television for all who were able to watch. However, this changed upon the singing of the national anthem.

Link Urealia, proclaimed by the royal family as the Hero of Hyrule and bearer of the Master Sword and the Triforce of Courage, was present at the service, pride of place and seated behind the royal family. He alone remained seated in an audience full of nobles and veterans from across the country who all came to remember those we have lost.

Understandably, many are infuriated and outraged by his actions. One veteran present went on the record anonymously to say that “I felt blatantly disrespected. I never saw him going around helping anyone and he didn’t pay the ultimate price for what happened. Not standing is just slandering everything he supposedly stood for. He should stand down from his position and if not, the royal family should sack him for what he did.”

The veteran speaks for many of us with his surprise and concern for what occurred that evening. Sir Urealia has agreed to speak for a feature but has declined to make a comment at this time in time for the publishing of this article.

When contacted for comment, the royal family stated that they have no jurisdiction over the actions of people at their services, and explicitly stated that the Princess Zelda did not have the authority to speak on matters of state public relations. Watch this spot on the Hylian Times for a feature in the coming week on Link Urealia’s actions.


	2. Explanation

The Legendary Loss: Why the Hero of Hyrule Refused to Stand

[Under the heading, a picture of Link Urealia takes up the whole of the first page. He is seated in a brightly lit room, on a black armchair. He wears the Hylian Guard regalia that he became known for during the war; green and trimmed with gold. The scabbard, now empty, of the Master Sword is strapped across his chest and slung over his back, along with a rifle laid against the chair]

Something that struck me as I interviewed the legendary Hero of Hyrule was not that I was interviewing one of the most important figures of our generation, someone who would probably go down in history. That barely even crossed my mind at the time, though I will admit it filled my thoughts both before and after the event.

No, the thing that struck me about Sir Urealia was how polite he was. There is always an idea of the hero portrayed in the legends, or even ideas about the stereotypical soldier as an incredibly strong and perhaps brusque man, tall and muscular. Used to violence.

Instead, Sir Link is shockingly young, polite, and incredibly quiet. He had sat in reception for fifteen minutes before our allotted appointment reading a book, which he enthusiastically recommended to me as he entered. He was also nervous, he confessed, to be interviewed; he’d never done anything of the sort before.

“I never felt for Hyrule as a country,” Link began, when asked if he was a patriot. Asking him on the direct question that had to be asked was left to wait for a while; answers always improve after a little rapport is built up between interviewer and the subject. “I’m a second generation immigrant here; my parents don’t speak any Hylian at all.”

“Surely that means you’re grateful to Hyrule?” I asked immediately. It didn’t make any sense, to me, to shun patriotism in a country that had so graciously let you in.

“Not particularly,” he said. “My parents nor I received any help from the government in finding a job, or finding a home, or a school that could teach me. It was my community that provided that for us. A tiny village, with almost no connections to the government and definitely not the monarchy. To me, Hyrule is a place and a people. Not a monarchy.”

“Do you not see a monarchy as representative of a nation?” I asked. “And surely that doesn’t necessarily mean you’re anti-monarchy?”

“I’m not,” he said immediately. “Princess Zelda is one of my best friends. I have never been against the monarchy, I just feel no particular loyalty to the system. If Zelda told me that she wanted me to stand for the anthem, directly, then I might ask why but I’d probably do it if she had a good reason. But as it stands, I don’t see any reason to.”

“And what do you think of the idea that it’s disrespectful to those who died?” I asked. Link’s brow furrowed.

“It’s a complicated question,” he admitted. “I understand, obviously, that people feel very strongly about it being important. And there would have been those who died that would have wanted me to stand, or would have thought it was disrespectful for me to not stand. But at the same time...I don’t think it’s disrespectful. It would have been worse for me to stand up for something I don’t believe in. The monarchy didn’t exactly do anything amazing or wonderful for the people of Hyrule.”

“Some people would say you’re wrong there,” I said. “Surely, Zelda did an amazing thing, and they all suffered alongside the rest of us?”

“None of the royal family died,” he said. “And none of them fought, either. I don’t blame them; I didn’t want to fight. I was conscripted and I didn’t want to be fighting. I hate fighting, and I hate violence. But at the same time, I don’t think it’s right to claim people’s loyalty for something you didn’t do. Zelda is the person who really did things, and she did that on her own. Not because she was a princess, but because she’s a good person.”

If I’m being honest, I was a little blown away by his statement. The popular opinion is that it’s thanks to the monarchy, their guarding of the Triforce, the way they conducted themselves during the war, that meant we survived to fight another day. But when I voiced that opinion, Link simply shook his head.

“That’s not the truth,” he said. “Because there are so many people who didn’t. Maybe it’s not the case here where all your colleagues had a job because there were things to report. Or the city could order air drops in from other countries because of how many people were here. But out in the villages, people died in their thousands. I went back to my home village in the last week and took some photos.”

Here, he showed me some photos, which, when I asked if they could be published in the feature to illustrate his point, he decisively declined. “It would be disrespectful,” he said. “They suffered and died in this world and no one needs to see that to prove that it happened. If they don’t believe me unless you publish gruesome pictures, then I don’t need them to believe.”

The long and the short of it is that no houses remain in that village. It was a border village at most, and Link spoke of the suffering that had been present. “I tried to reconnect with people once everything was done and people were...when people were likely to survive the rest of the time,” he told me. “My parents are dead. All of the people who taught at the school are gone, and every single family lost one or more members. So many didn’t make it out at all.”

The photos were incredibly telling. It was difficult to look at them, even, because of how clearly they showed the destruction. Link told me that he’d managed to talk to people about the repeated raids that took place, the destruction of food, the cutting off of running water, electricity, followed by the pollution of the closest source of running water.

“They were beyond the stated border of the war,” he said. “A battle was fought less than a ten minute drive away, and lost by the Hylians. I don’t blame the Hylian forces for what happened, but it’s emphatically true that the village were abandoned by the government as a whole and this didn’t just happen to my village. It happened to so many people who just happened to not be close enough to Castle Town.”

It was difficult to argue with something so emotional and close to Link’s heart. He is an adult, yes, but only nineteen years old and now an orphan. He told me his mother was looking forward to celebrating his twentieth birthday with him before he’d lost contact with her altogether, and at one point he had wanted to desert the armed forces, desert his quest, to see if he could help his village, but he had not been able to.

And I will admit that I didn’t feel any compulsion to argue with him. There is no part of his story that can be challenged effectively with ideas of politics and morality, There is nothing more important than his family and community to Sir Urealia, and I think, personally, that this is admirable.

This is not the answer that many were looking for, I imagine. Even as I send this article to my editor, I know it will likely be sent back for edits to make it look like I argued a bit more with him. People are looking for a young radical, a danger to Hyrule and the establishment we worked so hard to protect. Which people died to protect.

It is entirely understandable why people are angry. But the world should move on from that anger and develop into compassion. It’s compassion that people like Link need in these times, more than anything.


	3. Proposition

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Link has dreams, Zelda is there to encourage them.

“I wish I could go to university,” Link said. He’d been trying to focus on his book for ages now. But all he could think about was that article, and what he really loved in this world. He didn’t want to give up his life to something he didn’t support. He didn’t want to restrict his future.

He knew exactly what it was about that article that had made him think. It was the mention of his youth. The reminder of how old he was. How, if he’d been at home, he wouldn’t even really be considered an adult, just a ‘young adult’. People wouldn’t...even though he saw himself as so old now, and he felt so old, people didn’t see that.

When they looked at a nineteen year old student, no one saw the hero who had shouldered the fate of Hyrule, even if it was only for a few moments. They didn’t see a war veteran. They didn’t see him. They saw someone else, someone more innocent.

“Why can’t you?” Zelda asked, looking up from the work she’d been doing. She already had a degree. She was twenty, she’d gone early, she’d been working on it all through the war. The degree had been in Biological Sciences which Link had no clue about other than things that related to fairly basic first aid. She was smart. A genius, even. And she didn’t understand what his level of education really meant.

“Because I left school when I was fourteen,” he said. “To get a job. Because my family needed the money. I stayed part time, but I dropped out pretty quickly after that because it was too hard.”

“Oh…” She said. Link always forgot how little she knew about the circumstances of his life. They got on really well, of course, but they were worlds apart in terms of life experience. “Can you go back now?”

“I don’t know if I could,” he said with a shrug. He felt like it would be weird to go back to school when everyone else would be so much younger than him. He’d never been the best student, so he’d be pretty average anyway.

“I could get you some tutoring here,” she suggested. “If you wanted to do that, father would have no reason to deny you that opportunity. If you want to pursue studying, you should be able to.”

“It’s not a big deal,” he said. He really didn’t like bothering the king about anything, particularly after the whole fiasco with the national anthem. Still didn’t understand why his position on that was such a big deal seeing as patriotism was weird, but the point stood. He didn’t want to bother the king or be any more of a trouble.

“But it is to you,” Zelda said firmly. “You want to do this. You want to succeed, and all you do is bury your head in a book now, which is exactly what I would do if I could, so I don’t see why not. I think you could do well if you were given the time and resources to.”

“I don’t have the education background of the people that tutors normally teach,” he said, trying to object. He didn’t want anyone patronising teaching him and he definitely didn’t want Zelda’s family spending even more money on him for things he probably didn’t really need.

He was so grateful to them. They’d given him somewhere to live, food, clothes, anything he could actually need at a much higher level and cost than he’d ever received them at before. That was part of the problem. He had never wanted to be like this. He didn’t want to live in a rich people’s world, or live off their money.

They’d given him access to healthcare (who knew that being in a combat situation for far too long made you go almost deaf in one ear with hearing loss in another? No wonder he’d been struggling) and therapy (which, okay, was pretty vital, but they didn’t have to do that for him). They’d given him everything he currently had, pretty much, other than his identity and upbringing, which would always belong to his parents.

Damn it, they’d even paid for his parents to have a funeral. They’d given them graves in Castle Town. They’d paid to put a memorial monument up in his old village, and looked to see if they could find the previous inhabitants to give them assistance in going back to where they’d been before. They’d done absolutely everything Link could ever have asked of them, and now Zelda was suggesting...now she was suggesting that her family could give him more things he wanted but definitely didn’t need.

Link sighed. “I would quite like to be able to pursue schooling again,” he admitted. “But I don’t want you spending too much money on a tutor or anything.”

“Is this a thing about us just helping you again?” Zelda asked. Damn it, now she was about to suggest something even more charitable and amazing and it would be his fault that all the family’s money was going into a bunch of things that weren’t even that...okay, they were really important causes, but they didn’t need to do all of this. It would only benefit a couple of people, even if the cause meant the world to those people.

“We can go ahead and set up a scheme for veterans to return to education,” Zelda said, and now her eyes were lit up and she had that charity Zelda look on her face when she was just so enthusiastic about helping other people. That was part of the reason why he loved her so much, honestly; she just loved helping other people.

And just as he’d said, she didn’t do it because she was a princess. She did it because she was Zelda, and Zelda was just an incredible person. It had nothing to do with her loyalty to the monarchy, or the country. She would do it for anyone who needed it. If it was a country full of people she’d never met and didn’t really have a reason to care about, she still would have accessed the holy power of the Goddess to save them all.

“That would…” He honestly never knew what to say to these suggestions, because unless they were actually bad suggestions, he would never say they were bad. And if Zelda thought it was a good idea, well, she’d just get some money together and make it happen because rich people could do that, apparently. “That would be great,” he said.

“I knew it,” Zelda said with a grin, already reaching for her laptop to start organising something, probably. Because she was like that. “Well, I’ll get it moving, and you can return to your book. I bet you, Link, in two years you’ll have finished a secondary education and you’ll move onto university just like you want to.”

Honestly, when Zelda said something like that with conviction, Link couldn’t help but believe it. So, hearing Zelda say that, he had the kind of hope he hadn’t had for five years about his education.


	4. Opening

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Link gets another shot at the future he wanted.

A month later, plans had finally managed to match up and the school was opening. It was just outside the city (with subsidised or full grant transport for people who struggled to make it there, because Zelda’s kindness knew no bounds at this point), in a building that was a gym for about half of the week.

Link was the one who was opening it, alongside Zelda, and it was probably the first public event he’d been to where he felt strongly about being there. Usually he hated ceremony and formal events and...well, he hated this being famous thing, if he was being honest, but he was okay with this. This was different.

Standing here, listening to Zelda talking about the importance of access, the importance of reclaiming the time that people had lost to senseless violence, he really understood why she wanted to do these things. She was so genuine and lovely. Honestly, she was wasted on the monarchy. She should be a politician, with the way she had with words and the genuine good she was willing to do.

But then again, Link was developing a particularly large hatred of politicians, so he understood why Zelda probably didn’t want to be one of those. The monarchy thing gave her access to a lot of widespread support that a politician just...could never have.

“Link, could you say a couple of words?” Zelda asked, nudging him gently. He bit his lip and nodded. He’d prepared something, because Zelda said it would be good to because she’d wanted him to speak if possible, but...he was so nervous. Speaking for a crowd was still really difficult.

“This project means so much to me,” he said, waiting for the crowd to quieten down a little after he started speaking. People always got very excited when he spoke, because it made for great news. He just hoped that people wouldn’t make a habit of trying to twist it round on him this time.

“I grew up in a community where it was pretty normal to leave school when you were basically still a child. To support my family, I left school full time at fourteen to work part time and take night classes. As a rule, that doesn’t usually work out for anyone because you’re just so tired. It’s easier to take that time to sleep, or get some extra time to just relax.

“So when I was called up for the draft, I had pretty much given up on schooling forever. By the time I returned, if I ever did return, I’d be an adult. It would no longer be seen as respectable for me to pursue an education, so I’d just go on to working full time alongside my family. And I’d never get to do the things I’d loved the most as a child, which had been and honestly always will be learning.

“And it’s not just me who had this experience. Countless people between the ages of eighteen and thirty were called up for the draft. Even more would have had their schooling disrupted by the war. And I think this is the start of a really good step forwards to reverse what has happened to so many. I hope that many people will take up this opportunity to resume what they lost. Thank you to Zelda for making this happen. It really is amazing.”

Link tried not to cry as he turned away from the cameras and looked at the building that was about to become a school. This was...he was hesitant to say it, because it felt like such an overused turn of phrase, but it was life-changing. This was something he’d never once imagined, and he’d spent a lot of time encountering things he’d never really believed would ever face him over the last year.

“Thank you,” he said to Zelda. She smiled at him.

“Any time,” she said. “You’ve said it before, but we’re in different worlds. There are all these things out there for you that I’ll never understand. So thank you for helping me understand.”

“Any time,” he said, shooting a smile back at her. This was...this was how it was meant to be, he liked to think. This was the partnership between the Hero and Princess that he’d heard so much about. He wasn’t here to get romantically involved with Zelda, or steal her away from her duties in the same way that he didn’t have to devote his entire being to her. He just had to...be himself. And she’d be herself back.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading! If you could, a comment would be super appreciated :) I also take writing requests (primarily Zelda, Fire Emblem, and Xenoblade) so if you wanna see anything specific pls let me know. I also have a twitter (@samariumwriting) where I talk a bit more about stuff if you like that kind of thing


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